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Tuesday, November 25, 2008

The Dead and the Gone by Susan Beth Pfeffer

I loved Life As We Knew It, a book that seemed to haunt me for weeks. So I had high, high expectations for The Dead and the Gone, a companion book about the same catastrophic events. And it is every bit as good as the first.

If Life As We Knew It was set in rural America, The Dead and the Gone is set in New York and centers on the Morales family. 17-year-old Alex is left to look after his two sisters as his father was in Puerto Rico and his mother was on her way to work when an asteroid hits the moon and knocks it out of orbit. They deal with people disappearing, food shortages, early, bitter winter, illness, volcanic ash in the sky, rats, but unlike Like As We Knew It, this is about faith and how one family can retain hope in such horrifying circumstances.

If anything, this moving story is even more brutal and even darker, despite knowing where the story must inevitably go. It is never obvious, and is as captivating as it is devastating. And it made me cry.

Did this haunt you as much as Life As We Knew It? Was it as powerful, knowing what was going to happen? Let me know. Oh, and this was reviewed in The New York Times by John Green this month. To read his review click here . He also reviewed The Hunger Games, another of my favorites this year, in the same article.